


Articulation is to Reciprocation

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Communication, Developing Relationship, Drinking & Talking, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Second Kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27159944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: A day in the life, in which the day is actually an important one, and life keeps finding new ways to throw curveballs.
Relationships: Josh Lyman/Sam Seaborn
Comments: 5
Kudos: 42





	Articulation is to Reciprocation

**Author's Note:**

> the joke is i started writing this literally THE day we began self-quarantining, got less than 2k in, and then entirely abandoned it due to lack of creative energy. for those keeping score, yes this took me eight months to write. may everyone now enjoy the many nuances of sam seaborn's internal conflict resolution procedures

The receiver was cupped in the crook of Sam’s shoulder, pushing uncomfortably into his ear one way and jabbing up into his chin the other. He touched the length of his fingers to the back of his neck, a stranglehold of envy—not for anything more particular than the fact that some people could get away with saying whatever they wanted. As long as they had an office in a whitewash building and a nameplate ordered in bulk with dozens like it. How they did it—the unthinking—he’d never know. It was like seeing a street magician in the park, you knew there had to be some sort of reasoning behind it, but you couldn’t really put your finger on it.

“Congressman,” he said for the fifth or twentieth time, but the predications coming through the speaker mustered on. He’d be amused if he wasn’t so damn weary. “Sir, it’s not that I—I simply don’t agree with that, but I have some suggestions that might solve—”

The dial tone clapped suddenly, droning in Sam’s ear for a stretching moment before he forced it back into the cradle. Leaning forward, he braced his head in his hands, palms over his eyes like he could read between the lines. Under his breath, he mumbled his wish for the congressman to take a nice long walk off a nice short pier. It was almost as good a stress reliever as he thought it’d be.

“Christ,” he finally said, tucking it between his teeth like a slip of paper. Somewhere, he was sure, his mother was involuntarily cringing. Never mind that he’d picked up that particular verbal tick from _her_. Back when she used to tug the looping phone cord taught-straight out onto the back patio to sit with her oversized sun hat and sangria. From her lips to God and Aunt Tabby’s ears.

Without her around to swat his shoulder, he was left to let the dead air gather up his wildflower vitriol by the bunch.

Sam was too aware of the weight of words, always had been. It had been noted on more than one occasion as a part-time flaw of his. He leapt from subject to subject like it was hopscotch, hands tucked at his hips and mind set on high. One foot, two feet, trying to navigate his way to precision. It went beyond making his point, beyond trying to win, it was about saying what he meant and leaving no room for misinterpretation. There had been, were still, admittedly few people in his life that could keep up with that, even less that cared to.

And maybe it was his over-awareness that made him a writer—because he didn’t think he’d been born one, if he was being honest—but sometimes he wondered what it would be like if he didn’t have to pick and choose so much. Just a fraction of a percent less.

The longer he sat in his frustration, the bitterer it seeded, leaving him strung out on the taste burgeoning at the back of his throat. He scoffed, trying to dislodge his disgust, but it didn’t serve to do more than let the loitering figure in his doorway know he was in a foul mood. Figured.

Sam was having what most would generally call a bad day. He didn’t normally use that particular measure, but it was starting to seem like the most logical of descriptors. If he were himself-adjacent, Sam but two inches to the left, he might concede aloud that he was, indeed, having a rotten day. Get him drunk and he’d come up with twenty more ways to say it even more peculiar than that, each woefully hand-picked. _A rough go,_ he might say over something amber, _a troubling bout_ after downing something clear and fiery, washing away the decade of work he’d put into clearing morality out of the mundane parts of his life because it seemed to leak into every other crevice.

By the way Josh was looking at him then, shoulder against the doorjamb and thumbs hooked under his arms, there was a chance he already knew all of that. Actually, Sam amended when he pushed off the door and settled in the free chair on the other side of the desk without a word, he definitely already knew all of that. Probably more. Sometimes he was better at knowing all the things except the stuff he was supposed to, and somehow that worked out for him more times than it didn’t.

“Daniels’s speechwriter?” he asked, leaning onto his elbows in an unconscious mirror. His tie swung forward in pendular greeting.

“Daniels,” Sam corrected tiredly, rubbing at his eyes. “I axed most of his speechwriter’s draft for the announcement on the basis of it being almost entirely illegible on top of an increasing insipidness. What do you need?”

“Cover. I’m, y’know.” His hand ministered to the dust motes and flyaways. “Hiding out. Or whatever makes me sound tough.”

Despite Sam’s personal thundercloud, he still knew a gift when it was given. Didn’t even need a warning before the horse’s mouth, honest.

“And from whom are you hiding?” With Josh, it was always some _one_.

“Some, ah, key players. Just, in general, a couple prominent faces. It’s fine.” He scratched expectantly at his cheek like the answer was to be sounded from his stubble. Sam wasn’t exactly a virtuoso, as evidenced by the disastrous two weeks he’d spent in piano lessons when he was twelve, so that route was already a nonstarter. But Josh was fairly good, maybe the best, at figuring out how to speak to Sam when speaking was the last thing either of them had the patience for.

Exhibit A: the look he was giving Sam then.

“Donna?” Sam finally suggested, but even he knew that was a cheap shot. If it wasn’t true early in the day, there were always still plenty hours to go. Sam had once joked about sending her a thank you card, but some days it seemed like the least anyone could do for her.

“Among other notable White House women. See, I’m a leader, Sam. I lead. Today, I’m rallying the women of the White House toward a mutual cause. Tomorrow? Who knows.”

Sam filled the rest in himself with simmering amusement. “So, CJ, too.”

“And Carol. But it’s Carol, then Donna, then CJ, just so we’re clear. Carol, Donna, CJ.” He did the hand gesture and everything, one hand under the other under the next, apply emphasis as needed.

 _"Carol?_ How the hell did you manage that?” A laugh was percolating in Sam’s chest, pushing up into his first real smile of the day. And that was before he ever checked his watch. “And before noon! Actually, that’s impressive. I’m impressed.”

Josh slumped in his chair with a scoff-whine sort of thing, hand stretching over his forehead. “I said a thing and CJ’s gotta take care of the… thing. But apparently there’s, y’know, other work to be done than going behind me with a broom and a dustpan. That’s a direct CJ Cregg quote, by the way. Anyway, it turns out that stressing CJ out when she’s already stressed out earns you a ticket to the top of Carol’s shit list.”

“I didn’t even know she had one of those.”

“Keep it that way, huh?”

“And Donna figures into this where?”

Josh thumbed impatiently at his eyebrow and sighed again. “She’s taking CJ’s side in the state of affairs. Or maybe Carol’s? It was never made explicitly clear to me. But it’s like, it’s like the kids picking their mom in the divorce, man. You’ve got the new condo with the community pool, but it doesn’t even matter.”

Like a bubble burst, Sam laughed, full and instantaneous and it made Josh light up like a pinball machine.

“If I were you, and thank god I’m not,” Sam said, “I’d never say that to Donna. Or CJ. Or any other person, for that matter. But I’m an impartial entity, so between you and me, what exactly _is_ the condo in this metaphor?”

_“Sam.”_

“Better yet, what was it you said? Feel free to paraphrase, I’m sure Ginger can get me specifics.”

Josh shot him a rueful look that touched on humored. “I probably shouldn’t get too into it anyway, lest CJ hear me and commit a brutalization in front of the interns,” he said, and Sam thought that would be it, but he continued, “But I think when Ronald Blake threw around the term, what was it, ‘too big for his britches,’ in the statement he gave afterward, I think he summed it up, uh, pretty well.” There was the hand gesturing again, _actual_ air quotes without the decency of irony. It was a wonder he could walk around like that and _not_ have CJ come after him like some sort of small, vicious primate every day.

Truth be told, for all Josh’s ease in running their friends up the wall, Sam had _missed_ this. Between the Daniels speech gnawing away at what little was left of his sanity and the unspoken truce he and Josh had fallen into, it had been a week, at the least, since they did anything like this. That their treaty was shattered this way, with Josh blowing in unannounced, unprepared, unfazed, was no surprise. This was their play, always had been—running down the clock on short-term memory and barging ahead of whatever remained after the fact.

“So you’ve been sparring with Ronald Blake, of all people, and now CJ has to run, what, interference or damage control? And either way it’s going notably unwell. Should I be worried about guilt by association?”

Josh’s right dimple flashed. “Hey, only since you met me.”

"You would think I would have learned by now, then.”

“Yeah, well, I think all my luck’s gone into making sure you don’t wise up.”

Sam took a discarded pen between his fingers, trying to remind himself of…something. There was definitely something he wanted to remind himself of, but it was getting lost in Josh’s feedback grin. He’d missed that, too. The look.

“Well, if you’re planning on setting up camp here, we might as well order in,” he said, tapping the blunt end of the pen against his desk, the sound overly loud in his ears.

He could actually see the moment everything slid into place for Josh. Like he’d simply been running off muscle memory and forgone every cognitive thought in favor of how it had always been. And how it had always been was that they could hide out with each other any time they damn well pleased, need or not.

Sitting up straight with a grimace, the fair freckles on his face gathered in protest. “Nah, you’ve got—I should probably.” He chucked his thumb over his shoulder in lieu of predicate.

“Josh,” Sam started, flipping the pen around so he could jab the clicker into something with a satisfying clack. If he left now, it would make this all well and truly _something._ Less of whatever the hell it had been and more of a problem that they’d terrorize one another with like shadows in the corners.

“You’ve got—stuff. You’ve got Daniels!”

“If anyone calls back from Daniels’s office in the next hour, I deserve to have my lunch interrupted. Unless you’ve got somewhere you need to be so CJ can publicly flay you?”

One of the unfortunate things about Josh’s honesty was the extent to which it bled into his face. He never could quite keep what he was thinking out of his expression when among friends, and on the off chance he could, the eyes gave it away. Sam watched him do the math in his head, weighing this moment against the singular surety of CJ’s threshold for his bullshit. It was a relief to recognize it wasn’t much of a fight at all. At least they still had that going for them.

“All right, yeah,” he said, slumping back gracelessly. He tucked his elbows at his sides and folded one leg over the other, getting comfortable. If he was relaxed, then Sam could, and god knew he needed it. Another knot in his shoulders and he’d look like a kinked up garden hose just unearthed from the back of the shed after a long winter's nap.

Josh asked, “What’re you thinking?” and Sam came back to himself.

“Well, it’s Tuesday, so food. Preferably edible, but a case could be made for a strong imagination, I suppose. Given that I might actually have the time to eat something at a speed not considered breakneck, however, I’m petitioning for the former.”

Fingers braced against his face, Josh hid his amused smile behind the line of his middle and ring fingers. “So, the usual?”

“Ah, yeah."

By virtue of his position, Sam had to be two steps ahead of a good majority of people he came into contact with on a daily basis. Yet Bonnie, Cathy, and Ginger were still somehow always three steps ahead of _him_. It was reassuring, if not entirely vexing, and never wholly unpleasant. Case and point, by the time he patched in the line to the desk out front and got someone to answer, he was assured that both his and Josh’s lunch orders were on the way, having been lodged by Ginger when she ‘saw Josh slink into your office like he’d done something bad.’

He thanked her with a laugh before she had to flip to one of the three holding lines.

Josh’s fingers rattled on the slim arm of his chair, eyes casting from clock to window to bookcase and back, until they landed on Sam, where they would then start the rotation again. He looked almost pained, lips turned down at the corners and something so _un-Josh_ about him.

Sam kept his mouth resolutely shut, just so it wouldn’t add anything more incongruous to the mix than that which it already had.

It was to be said—clarified for the record, really—that they’d been sober. They were, all things considered, well-rested, not a specter of a twenty-five hour workday over their heads. Josh hadn’t recently closed any deals and Sam hadn’t emerged from behind his desk, either triumphant with a final draft or just to ask Toby to put him out of his misery by beaming him in the temple with that Spalding ball. A no on inebriation, sleeplessness, and either end of excitement left a list that looked a lot like want and wish.

Sam had gone to Josh’s place after work because the cable or the power or the intersection of the two was on the fritz and his landlord believed fixing something meant closing one’s eyes and wishing on a shooting star. And since getting electrocuted while watching C-SPAN was a little too pathetic of a way to go, even for him, he’d hoofed it downtown without a thought, only stopping to pick up a consolation prize in the form of dinner for two from the little deli right around the corner from Josh’s place.

When he knocked, Josh swung the door open and padded back to the kitchen all in one breath, seemingly unsurprised. While Sam hung his scarf and coat by the door, the repeat of the six o’clock news cut to commercial, and Josh rattled off a recap ducked behind the fridge door.

After nabbing plates and silverware, they crowded together on stools pushed close enough that their knees bumped under the bar. They drank root beer out of bottles like they were ten years old and heckled the newscasters like they were eighty, picking at sandwiches in the off-time with only as much grace as was afforded to those batting closer to forty than thirty.

There wasn’t much to say about the rest. Eventually their plates were cleared and the channel changed and the night started bleeding out. It was late, but only just so, when Josh followed Sam doggedly to the door, powered by whatever came to mind. Shaking his shoulders into his coat and weaving an artful knot out of his scarf, Sam watched Josh with an old fondness as he ambled toward his point.

“Okay,” Sam said, finally. He’d meant to crack a joke, something about his gratitude for not being left out in the hallway, but what came instead was the fit of his hand over the side of Josh’s face and the pull into a languid kiss that felt as familiar to his fingers as the weight of a pen.

Josh landed a hand on his shoulder and dug in, not unpleasantly, nudging closer with a warm mouth and steady touch. Noses brushing past one another to find how they best fit. When it broke, and that was such an impetuous word for it, Sam tipped his head down, an inhale shaking through his mouth. Seeing their feet in ABAB pattern, slick penny loafers and garbled winter socks, he thought he understood poetry.

After having done it, it seemed plainly foolish that they hadn’t already. There had been plenty of looks, thinking back on it now, plenty of moments that bent the term borderline like a lug wrench, but it had never _happened._

Sam didn’t know just how much he’d wanted it until it was over. Looking up, he found one of Josh’s eyes crinkled like he was trying to look past a streamer of sunlight, smiling that stupid smile that made his dimples really show and didn’t have a lick of arrogance to it.

“Okay,” Sam said again, “I’m gonna head out.” And somehow it worked. That was that, so they say. Josh didn’t try to reel him back in and Sam didn’t lose any dignity in chasing his mouth.

By all accounts, they’d left things normally. As normal as it could be in the aftermath of the kiss, because there was a kiss to put _the_ in front of now like it was some sort of situation. Swift and natural as water to ice, encroaching on mundane.

And now Sam wanted to talk about it. Needed was a strong word, too heavy-handed, but it’d do in a pinch. What it came down to, in all honesty, was the almost scarring lack of tension. There hadn’t been a problem when he pulled the door behind him, no sign of what was to come when Josh leaned out the window with a whistle and a wave and a grin, no trouble when Sam called an hour later for an unrelated work thing. There hadn’t even been a hiccup the next morning when they first saw one another; their business carried on much the way it always had, with them buzzing around one another, Josh damning at least one member of the Senate to a fate worse than death, and Sam’s hand jack-rabbiting over the page while the other half of his brain offered suggestions out of the side of his mouth. It was the day after, actually, when Sam got bull-headed and Josh got distant. _Quelle surprise._

Often in his life, Sam dived down rabbit holes to get the answer to the questions that itched at the back of his throat. It went beyond politics, crept past natural curiosity, bordered on insanity. Etymology was his biggest crux, because one word derived from another influenced by a prefix in a language long changed could lead him around like a dog chasing its tail. He’d learned from it, made it into a pattern. Where to look and what to read to get the answers he was after. He’d also learned that you couldn’t get every answer from a book. Sometimes, _sometimes,_ it came down to asking someone that’d had a little more time than you in the field you were trying to plow.

Eyes on the door, waiting for the depression of the handle and Ginger poking her head in to ask for permission she didn’t often wait for, “You think we’ll ever talk about it?” he asked, surprising even himself.

Josh’s head snapped up, mouth moving fruitlessly. Bewildered, Sam thought, utterly bewildered.

“I don’t mean _now._ I was just thinking—completely off the table, or?” The words kept tripping out, leaving him to watch like a kid treading the deep end of the pool without their floaties on, the waterline rising. He felt ill. And at least a little stupid, as pronounced by the clock overhead reminding him they were still at work.

“I didn’t think you wanted to.”

_“Me?”_

Thumbing warily at his neck. “Yeah, you.”

“How would I, how were we even going to, I mean, with you so studiously avoiding me!”

“Me?” Josh echoed, two fingers seizing the end of his tie and tugging thoughtfully. _“Me?_ Sam, you’ve been hiding out in this office like it’s your own personal Fortress of Solitude. I’ve been trying to be a, a friend, or a—” He tripped over _a gentleman_ like _that_ was crossing the line. As if there were a line to cross anymore. “I don’t know! You seemed freaked, I didn’t want to impose, but you’ve gotta know I’ve been trying to…to.” He swung his hands around, pushing them forward in parallel mount. The line of his mouth drew up, consternated in the lack of efficacy on the part of his gesture.

For what it was worth, Sam got the picture. As soon as he said it—mimed it, rather—Sam knew it was true. See, Josh wasn’t in the habit of outright lying to him about these things, and Sam, well, he did have a thing for running. He’d run from the west coast to the east, from one degree to the next, from school to work, from work to Lisa, and god knew he’d run from Lisa six ways before the sun came up. Right to Bartlet, and D.C., and the very office he sat in then, and to Josh. But it was more convenient to forget all that, wasn’t it? To blame _He Who Couldn’t Commit._

And what a load of bull that was. Josh was probably the only person Sam knew that could commit and never look back. Anyone who believed different was either too attached to the silhouette of the reputation, or had never seen Josh at his most tenacious. He lacked a certain grace in his execution of all things, but he had more than enough passion to be admirable.

Sam had passion, sure—that was his more favorable middle name, after all. And while he loved what he did and who he did it with and who he did it _for_ , there was no way around admitting that he knew how to beat a hasty retreat at the first sign of smoke.

He hadn’t meant for it to be like that this time. He’d wanted, just this once, to stand and face the aftermath. Running from the good things in life just because they got hard really wasn’t any way to live.

Before he could figure out how to say any of that, the window thumped. Peeking through the blinds, Ginger raised their lunches and her eyebrows, at once expectant and hesitant. He waved her in.

Forcibly oblivious to the thick silence, she dished out containers and corrections like they were morning announcements. “Sam, they were out of those weird little pumpernickel croutons you like, so you’ve got regular. Josh, you might want to check the chicken.”

Already halfway into his meal, horror cropped up at the corner of Josh’s mouth. “For _what_ , exactly?”

She shrugged. “Honestly? We’re still not sure.”

“Always a pleasure doing business with you, Ginger.”

“You too, Josh.” Already seeing herself out, she peeked back around the door and settled Sam with a pointed look. “Donna said you can have him for twenty more minutes. Got it?”

Sam busted his utensils out of their crinkly packaging as noisily as possible. “Got it.”

She pulled the door, effectively silencing the throng of voices mixing just beyond the threshold.

Josh sighed. “Y’see that? It’s _Sam, we had to replace your gourmet croutons_ and then it’s _Josh, don’t contract a foodborne illness._ I think Donna has a hit out on me and it’s travelling through the assistants like some kind of mini governmental mafia.”

“You know what? I think she’d be much more disciplined than that.”

“Funny. Have fun with your regular croutons like the rest of us.”

“Pumpernickel’s a good source of manganese,” he muttered distractedly, nudging a hunk of bitter-white lettuce to the side of his bowl. He couldn’t remember where he’d read that.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Encyclopedia Brown.”

Like a checkmark, Sam smiled with the corner of his mouth. Relative silence ensued, punctuated every now and then by Josh shifting side to side. When he finally stilled, there was a conspiratorial inhale, poorly hidden. Sam would’ve felt guilty if the way Josh’s face creased when he was trying to work out a problem hadn’t been a long-term source of amusement for him.

When the clock was run down and it was time for Josh to take his leave, lest Donna come hunting him, he stood, and Sam did, too.

“Uh,” Josh said, eyes snipping Sam from one side to the other. “If you ever do want to talk about it, I’m all ears. Otolaryngological nightmare.”

“Okay,” Sam said simply. Sometimes he forgot. That Josh could be so spot on, that he could be tactful, if only with a little effort.

Nodding once, he rapped his knuckles against the desk. “Right,” he said, and moved to leave.

“I’m going for a drink after work,” Sam said, shuffling a handful of papers before taking his seat again. He took his glasses from his shirt pocket and became intent on getting them up his nose without putting an eye out, all while looking for something with Toby’s red ink marks spackled over it to put him back in his place after this. It was the classic mistake of trying to look busy and instead coming out on the other side looking like a flummoxed bird.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll keep that in mind.” Josh patted the doorframe in an oddly fraternal gesture before disappearing entirely.

He found something useful then, a week old and two drafts behind them, but it would do. When Ginger came sniffing around a couple minutes later, he merely shook the papers pointedly. Content that he wasn’t hiding Josh behind the bookshelf, she left, too, leaving behind the smell of ink, probably from another battle with the copier. Plausible deniability had its standings, after all.

The afternoon into the early evening tore on like a scraped knee, an unpleasant lurch that buttered itself blue before falling back on well-worn purple. Stinging in concentric, riverbed circles out from center.

He left before Cathy did, three layers deep into his scarf before he caught her looking at him like he was one of those two-headed barnyard animals.

“You feeling okay?” she asked, urging a stack of papers into line against her desk. She popped the stapler through them before he could respond.

“Fit as a fiddle." And why he'd said that, he could not say. "You don’t want to cut out early?”

She shook her head. “Can’t.” She popped the stapler through two more stacks in quick, pungent bursts.

“Where’s Toby?”

“In with Leo. You sure you’re all right? You look a little…” Her face scrunched up. “Frazzled,” she diagnosed.

“I’m fine. It’s obviously you we should be worrying about. Go home, Cathy, seriously. You don’t even have to go home, it’s—look, it’s not even nine yet,” he said, shaking his watch around.

A small smile tucked onto her lips, then. “I won’t tell Toby you went out drinking without him. Scout’s honor.” She even gave him the salute.

“That’s not really—you were a Scout?”

“I spent some time catatonic in front of a few grocery stores with a tableful of stale cookies for sale, if that’s what you mean. My troop wasn’t allowed back in the forest after we tried to smuggle a skunk back home with us in our den mother’s sleeping bag.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Sometimes. Have fun, Sam.”

He lifted a finger off his bag’s strap and inclined his head, taking his leave to the sound of her heel’s point tapping the underside of her desk. A metronomic countdown to his imminent implosion. Maybe the ensuing fire would wrench the sand into something like a lightning strike on the shore.

By the time he made it out of the main burst of Communications, the halls were suspended in that quiet sweet spot just after the people that clocked out when it was still daylight, and just before the all-nighters nursing national headaches the precise size of extra-strength Aspirin bottles headed for the late bus. The lights were on, but low, fluttering from between the portraits and brass plates stuck to the walls.

Sam had grown used to the haunted feeling of the White House after hours. The worst of them all was the mismanaged witching hour of four a.m., right before the sky sipped lilac in through a straw. That was when the cars in the parking lot and taxis at the gate were as grave a sight as a funeral procession; the people hustling around the rat’s maze less human and more aptly three crises belted and buttoned up after the first beep of the pager. When he thought of that hour, he thought of the shadows hitting the eagle’s claws in the Oval and the taste of world-heavy grief on the stomach without enough sleep. He thought of being twenty phone calls in with sloppy speeches written on whatever could be found, the day reaching its turning point outside and funneling wane light through the windows.

A similar dread was hauling itself up inside him. Odd as it was, there was a kin kind of grief, too. He searched for a more apt comparison, one that wasn’t so permanent, but couldn’t come up with anything else. He supposed there was a sort of end coming for him now.

Sam hardly ever started drafting a speech he didn’t already know the ending to. It didn’t have to be concrete, per se, but there had to be purpose to the keystrokes, there had to be even the vaguest of outlines before he could commit, couldn’t just flounder around until he stumbled into something. He hated not knowing how things ended, which was why he tended to stack his shelves with formulaic sci-fi novels and movies he’d seen at least half a dozen times before. Was why he calculated risks before he took them to make sure they’d pay off one way or another. It was why he kept coming back—to this work and this city and, admittedly, Josh. For now there was a bone-deep truth for him about D.C. An itch he hadn’t scratched yet.

In the time it took him to blink, the curtain fell over the swelling lights of the lobby and the night announced itself. He took the front steps two at a time, making a marked line for the gate as his coat caught the wind.

His phone chimed at his belt, and it was only as he stopped short to fumble with the clip that he realized how fast he’d been walking, just how hard he was breathing. He ran his hand over the back of his head, scrubbing frustratedly at his hair.

“Sam Seaborn,” he answered, looking high and looking wide. He couldn’t see the stars, but the sky would do just as well.

“Yeah, geez, could you slow down? You look like you’re fleeing the scene.”

He pivoted on his heel and scanned behind him. Halfway down the steps, he could just make out Josh’s silhouette, either trying to flag him down or swat a particularly persistent bee. He waved back, just in case.

“If I’d known there was gonna be an evening jog, I would’ve worn better shoes,” Josh said, sidling up with a discreet hand on the stitch in his side as the other snapped his phone shut. “Seriously, did you poison someone?”

“If I had, which I haven’t, I don’t think it would be a sound practice to go around telling people about it.”

Josh hiked his bag up his shoulder. “Point taken. Where to?”

“Was it not obvious?”

“Hey, sometimes you take me by surprise.”

“Josh.”

“What, poor timing?”

“A little bit, yeah.”

“I’m a little out of my element here—when I get nervous they just kinda roll off the tongue.”

Sam grinned, pushing the gate shut behind them. “Only when you’re nervous?” Then, thoughtful, “Do I make you nervous?”

“No. It’s not you so much as it is…this.”

“This?”

“The, the space, or the elephant in the room. I don’t know. Y’see? It just rolls—”

“Right off the tongue, yeah. Look, if you don’t want to do—if you don’t want the elephant, we can just.”

“Just?”

“Just talk. About the weather. The Rangers-Canes game. How I got Daniels’s speechwriter back on the phone after two hours and didn’t make him cry, even though it crossed my mind in earnest. I mean, we can talk about anything, god knows we’ve been doing it for over a decade.”

Josh’s eyebrows raised at the snatch of honesty, but he shoved his hands roughly into his pockets and kept his chin pointed due north. “That’s sort of the thing, the talking. I want—I want to talk to you, all the time, about the weather, and _hockey_ , and how you almost made a grown man cry on the phone today because his commas were spliced, or something. But it’s more than that, it’s—I want to not talk, if that’s what the moment calls for, if the moment is you and me. It’s a little selfish, but I want more, and it’s probably why we should talk about _this_ now, because I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know if I’m gonna have it in me to say all this tomorrow, and it’s not for lack of trying.”

“Nothing has ever been for lack of trying with you,” Sam said, anything but unkind. “That’s always been my end of the stick. I’ve been reflecting, so this might come out a little self-incriminating.”

“We can’t always plead the fifth.”

“No, we can’t.”

Sam inhaled deeply, air biting on the way down, but it did him some good, swept his words into order. He felt a little more moored than he had all week. “I tried it, with Lisa, and probably every other—I tried the trying to be cool, the saying things I didn’t mean and being someone I wasn’t, all for some unclear sake. We’re not old, Josh, but I’m too old for _that_.”

“Okay,” he said simply, like the fix was that easy. Sam wanted to believe it was, but he still had more to say that would burst the seams if he didn’t siphon some of it off.

“I honestly don’t know how you do it,” he admitted, touching Josh’s crooked elbow. Nothing overt, just a light enough pressure to get him to look over at him. When he did, all-encompassing, Sam’s hand fell away. “You just, you do, and you say, and you _are_ , and I’ve never known how you do it. If it’s because you don’t know what you want, or because you _do_ and the only way you know how to make it happen is by doing the damn thing. It’s something I came to admire back at the beginning, and every year I get a little more endeared, and I get a little more incredulous.

“Because I know, historically, I haven’t been very good at knowing what I want, but I do now. Took me a while, but.” He shrugged, he wouldn’t be saying anything Josh didn’t already know. Indecision was something they shared, when it came to their personal lives, and for all the admiration Sam had for Josh’s bravado, he knew he fumbled the ball just as much.

Their conversation dropped there as they threaded past dinner parties milling outside bistros, laughing with wind-rosy cheeks. Beyond them, the sidewalks gradually crowded further, until there was no way to have an honest discussion. So the silence prevailed until they slung the door open on their preferred watering hole—it was only one degree above a crapshoot, but it was theirs, and that was what counted.

True to form, Sam took his usual seat at the end of the bar, as close to the TV as he could get without sitting at the bend under it. Josh took the stool on his right. The bartender raised her index finger in recognition while she tossed a coaster down in front of a man with a face so wrinkled it was hard to make out any distinct features.

“Seaborn, Lyman,” she greeted, lodging a familiar smile. “You two getting into trouble tonight? Well, not you so much,” she added, tipping her head towards Sam. Josh’s proclivity for getting shitfaced off less alcohol than that imbibed by a teenager sipping his first room temp beer was a well-known fact in certain circles, and tirelessly funny in just about all of them.

“Ah, c’mon,” Josh muttered.

She shook her head amusedly, coming to tack coasters down in front of them, too.

Sam watched her move as she unearthed two glasses from under the bar and set to filling them, her movements at ease with practice. Caldwell had to be in her 50s, he guessed. She’d owned the bar as long as they’d been coming around, and long before that, too. He wondered what it was like to know with certainty you were where you were supposed to be, doing what you were supposed to do.

“You know where to find me,” she said, depositing a beer in front of them each. Satisfied they weren’t on some sort of party warpath, she skirted back down to her only other patron, excavating a deck of cards from the pocket of the apron slung around her waist. She snapped a rubber-band from around them and commenced shuffling with deadly accuracy, not even looking at the cards in her marked hands.

Settled with their drinks and coats on the backs of their chairs and ties loosed at their throats, Josh looked over and asked, “What is it?”

“What’s what?” Sam asked, looking up from the button at his shirtsleeve.

“You said you know what you want. What is it?”

An incredulous smile overtook Sam’s face, all the way to his ears. He could imagine the creases at his mouth and eyes pinching up with fondness. Undoing each set of buttons for each sleeve, he rolled his them up to his elbows, glancing over a couple times, but letting the moment ultimately stretch until Josh got a positively flustered look stuck to his face and pointed at his chest.

“Don’t give yourself all the credit,” Sam quipped, but it was a poor resistance. Credit where credit was due was a Sam Seaborn tenet.

“I’ll try not to let it inflate my ego any further.”

“And I can think of a hundred federal employees that would thank me personally for that.”

He grew quiet as the revelation sank back to its haunches. Just like he knew what— _who_ —he wanted, he knew what he wanted to say, too. He clasped his hands in front of him, tight as the leather band on a new watch. Because he was afraid they’d do something embarrassing, like shake. If he so much as trembled this close to the finish line, he thought he might die, and he had a number of things he wanted to live for.

“I want to be happy, Josh,” he said. “I want to be happy, and be a better man than—I want to do right, by the people I care about, and be _good._ A good man who’s good for someone else, because the older I get the more I think that’s the best thing you can do with your life. Even if you don’t get anything else right, at least you made things better for, for someone, and that _matters_. It matters to me. And maybe good makes good, and good people make living worthwhile. I want to make it worthwhile for a lot of people, but I think I’ll always want to do that for you. To be someone who’s good for you, because I already know with perfect certainty you’re someone that’s good for me.”

Simply by virtue of the amount of years they’d known one another, Sam had seen Josh speechless before. He was thinking then of one time in particular, most of the details of which evaded him now. Standing in front of one monument or another, Josh with his hands on his hips and his jaw working frantically, never a word leaving his lips. He’d been low-level then, as odd as it was to remember a time when they didn’t have the credence of the White House to their names, and had gotten chewed out by the guy above him from the trickledown of a fuck-up. It was nothing new, even then, but Josh didn’t speak for a record-setting seven hours afterward.

Sam only remembered it now because he’d never seen such a drastically different version of the same state of being from someone. Under the crappy bar lighting, Josh looked downright exulted.

“I think you just did the damn thing,” he said with a shaky smile after a commercial break’s length of making aborted sounds at the back of his throat and rattling his fingers on the bar top. “Are you kidding me? That was, I mean, you’re gonna give yourself an aneurysm keeping all that in.”

“It did feel pretty good,” Sam admitted, a purposeful understatement. He felt like he’d just lost ten pounds.

Josh ran a distracted finger over his glass, drawing a nonsensical scribble in the sweat gathered there while he looked at Sam like he was completely new. “You just blew my whole thing out of the water. I practiced it, y’know.”

“Really?”

He held up the according fingers. “Thrice.” He took a sip off his beer.

Sam’s laugh coughed out of him, his shoulders shaking and his eyes squinting shut. It was as much a laugh of humor as one of pure relief for the singular knowing that he wasn’t the only one. The mental image of Josh rehearsing _any_ of the things he’d said over the last twelve hours was itself a balm.

When he came to, Josh was looking at him close-lipped and open-faced. It was probably too fond for public consumption, but hell, they went to that bar for a reason. That was, they were reliably among the only patrons on week nights unless there was a particularly important sporting event and all the other TVs in the district were on the fritz. And Caldwell was more concerned with the game of gin rummy she was currently embattled in than she ever would be with what they were saying.

“So, the kiss,” Josh started, turning himself enough that he had to brace his elbow on the bar.

“It wasn’t all that weird, was it?”

“I definitely would not call it that.”

Sam huffed in amusement. “No, I just mean, it didn’t seem all that out of the ordinary. For us. You didn’t seem surprised. _I_ wasn’t surprised.”

“I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, do you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

A pause, not awkward. Another drink, but then they hadn’t made it through half a glass between the two of them.

“So, if it happened again,” Josh said, “If it happened regularly. If we did it on purpose.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me either.”

“But would it be—would it make you…. Do you _want_ to?”

 _But would it be worth it? Would it make you happy?_ Sam could fill in the blanks just fine by himself, him and his abundance of words. And would you have it, he had an answer to that all those, too.

“If I’d asked myself any of those questions six months ago, a year ago, I think I would have equivocated until there was some kind of crisis to hide behind. Because the answer has always been yes, Josh, it’s always been yes, to all three of them, but I’ve been giving up the things I want my whole life if they’re too hard to say. I don’t think I can do that with you again. Give you up.”

“What changed?”

Sam had taken to counting the bowl of pretzels in front of them out of the corner of his eye. He bookmarked the task at thirty-two, because he’d already said the hard parts, hadn’t he? This was all just the follow through.

“Plenty of things, but about a week ago I got proof of concept. It’s easy enough to say no if you don’t know what you’re shooting down. What I mean is you’re much harder to deny in person.”

Tension bled from the corner of Josh’s eyes like gasoline out of a punctured tank. It dripped visibly down him, doing something to the set of his jaw, the length of his neck, the twist of his shoulders. Visibly, his whole demeanor changed, softened. And yet what came out of his mouth next was a hoarse sort of, “You wanna tell that to Congress?” that made Sam laugh.

“I’ll pass. Otherwise, it gets more complicated than it already is.”

“Yeah,” Josh said, thoughtful. “Yeah, it would be. I mean, we’re talking about a lot of, of lying. This isn’t just smooth-talking donors and promising one thing to one guy and the complete opposite to the other guy, this is…and I don’t want, I mean, if you feel like you’re going to have to compromise some part of yourself, just so that we can be….”

“Happy?” Sam tried.

“Well, when you put it like that.”

“It makes the answer sound a lot more like ‘why the hell not?’ doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Josh murmured, notching his chin in his hand in a move Sam had seen a thousand times over.

For his part, Sam had already done this back and forth with himself. And while he was sure Josh would come up with questions he hadn’t, he was also sure he had answers for the ones Josh wouldn’t even think to ask. So, he did what he did best. He argued.

“Calling it lying is too harsh. The inherent negative connotation around it entirely warps the argument. You can’t see it objectively that way. So call it discretion. That’s what we do every day, what we already take home anyway.”

“I’m not trying to talk my way out of this,” Josh replied, drumming the fingers of his free hand in front of his long-forgotten beer. As if Sam would ever entertain the thought. “I’m the disaster guy, right? That’s my gig. And you’re the cautious optimism, and I want to be that optimism, I want to be that good thing because being anything else, anything less, that’s not an option in my book. But I don’t want you to look back on this right here one day and it be the moment you hate me for. The one where I couldn’t weigh the risks because I wanted it too much.

“But you gotta know by now I want in. You gotta know I want on this train; wherever it’s headed, I don’t care. You’ve always given me the benefit of the doubt, even when I was asking you to, to possibly ruin your life so we could try to go move a mole hill that might be a mountain! So, you say call it discretion and I’m already dialing, all right?”

Sam could feel his—what was it? Not elation, not relief, he’d already been through those and was now bypassing them entirely. Justification. Vindication. Surety so smooth it went down like something top shelf.

Josh had been Sam’s sure bet for a third of his life. At the beginning, that meant he was someone that Sam looked to for advice because he always had some great plan or some far-flung goal, a weathervane heart that took a beating in the hurricane and still kept pace at the end. But the longer Sam was around, the more he established himself, it became an imaginary gulley that closed entirely. They were elbow to elbow, jostling each other to keep pushing forward. And now? Sam knew without a shadow of a doubt if he was the guy in the hole, Josh was the one who jumped in after him. They weren’t rain or shine, but hell or high water.

But even in that, there had been a few times in his life where Sam felt like he’d asked more of Josh than he should have. The last time was asking Josh to let him go. They hadn’t been anything, were just confidantes in a city with nowhere certain to go except up, if they’d ever been _just_ anything. And even if it hadn’t been in so many words, even though Josh had been asking the same thing, Sam had still pushed forward, asked to be culled from Josh’s tree, shaken out if he wouldn’t let go. Because there was Dewey-Ballentine, and Gage-Whitney to follow, there was Lisa, and Christmas cards from his parents’ perfect marriage. There were pretenses to keep and all the things Sam wasn’t big enough to refute, so he asked for something harder from someone else so he could duck and cover and not have to see the mess he made.

He knew asking someone to hold onto you was just as big an ask, just as unreliable a wager. It might be too much. Because when two people part, there’s a set amount of endings. The split either takes or it doesn’t. But in this, in choosing to stay, there’s a thousand and one finales. It works or it doesn’t, it implodes or it holds, it lasts a week or the rest of their lives, wrecks their friendship and their careers and the fate of the nation for one pernicious news cycle, or it doesn’t touch any part of their lives it isn’t supposed to, remaining an unblemished tick on their ledgers.

Sam had finally met an ending he couldn’t foresee, but. But. It was that exactly. The exception to the rule and the reversal of it all and the clause tacked onto the main event.

Because it wasn’t the speech that needed to be written. It wasn’t a strong opening line and easy transitions and an underlying theme that wove its way to a staunch conclusion. Because it wasn’t the dime novel, sci-fi thriller on his bookshelf. It wasn’t a doomed repetition or a sage enlightenment or a sensationalized crapshoot. Because it wasn’t a movie that’d he’d seen over and over and over. It wasn’t a song and dance or a moral high ground, and they didn’t make movies that looked like this anyway.

Because it was a train, headed somewhere fast, and they’d finally realized they were both on board.

Josh was facing the raucous final round of gin rummy taking place not fifteen feet from them, interest momentarily piqued. Caldwell had just slapped down what he surmised to be the best hand one could accrue, but then again, to say he knew squat about the rules of gin would be too kind. “Hey,” he said over his shoulder, “You feel like we just negotiated—”

“Multiple last minute riders? A little bit, yeah.”

When Josh turned back around, he had a twinkle in his eyes. “I don’t remember this being such a formal process. You didn’t need my résumé, right? ‘Cause I don’t think I’ve updated that thing since ’89.”

“I’m fairly sure I remember ritualistically burning the last known copy of mine in a gold-plated trashcan while someone stood by with a fire extinguisher. And no one on the campaign ever asked for my credentials because, and this is according to Donna, you’d spent the three weeks before I arrived relaying my CV to any- and everyone who would listen. And even some who wouldn’t.”

“Because _Donna’s_ such a bastion of truth,” Josh said, not a drop of malice in his voice. Saying Donna wasn’t honest was like saying Josh wasn’t neurotic.

“Because _you’re_ such a monument to patience?”

Josh did the thing with his face that made Sam’s chest feel like an hourglass, where it was obnoxiously winning and yet boyish, too, in the way his dimples showed. “And peace, love, and understanding. I’m basically a shining pillar of virtue.”

“I’ll make sure to pass that quote on to CJ so she can properly eulogize you the next time you piss off Ronald Blake.”

“Don’t let her forget the part about virtue, yeah?”

With the tension finally at ease, the bar leeched silence from them, letting them instead fill the space between breaths with conservative drinks off their buzzing-warm glasses. Under the bar the stools creaked, and Sam felt Josh’s knee bump nearly imperceptibly against his, so quick it could’ve been a fluke. Could have, but wasn’t. It was the equivalent of a big, red rubber stamp at the bottom of the form; case closed, amen.

Caldwell waved off her penultimate patron with good will that was hard to find so genuine these days. When the door clamped shut behind him, she turned her focus back on them in a sweep of hair that changed color in the light. At once gold and auburn and brash brown, murky waters threaded with the sway of all the amber liquid abound.

“Awful quiet down here tonight,” she commented, running her thumb over one graying eyebrow that was bisected by a thin, silver scar. “Need something stronger? I’ve got a new mix raring to go.”

“Never again,” Sam said, the phantom of _that_ hangover patting his shoulder in consolation. He’d almost gone into a caffeine overdose trying to down enough black coffee to subdue the headache. She’d made him swear off cocktails with just one drink.

Josh, involuntarily cringing, opted for point blank truth. “The last time you mixed me a drink, I woke up on my bathroom floor thinking it was 2009 and I was living in Boca Raton.”

Mildly, she said, “Oh, that’s a new one,” with a smile like a moth-bitten t-shirt. Patchy, but comfortable. She met Sam’s eyes—black to blue—and tapped the bar with the lengthy nail on her middle finger. Without much else, she produced a glass of water—no ice, no lemon, no straw, just air bubbles rising from the false bottom unimpeded—and placed it in front of Josh. For kicks, she added another for Sam.

Josh took his gratefully, almost dumping half the damn glass over his lap trying to get it to his mouth, but he made it without catastrophic event in the end. For want of anything else to do with his restless hands, he’d nearly finished his beer, and there was a window for these things, a timer counting down to hand his system something to cut the alcohol before it sealed his fate to spend the next day with every faculty in revolt. And he wanted to remember the night, if only as precedent for what was to come. This was their ratifying convention; the new constitution was law of the land now. Whatever that meant, well, that was up to them to figure out.

Sam settled his tab first, waiting by the door for Josh who traded jabs with Caldwell to pass the time waiting on his change. She doled it out slowly, with as many coins as possible so that when Josh walked toward him, he jangled like a Dickensian nightmare-child off to the candy shop with their paper-hawking money. Door whining at his back, Sam told him as much, and it made Josh throw his head back in laughter.

They set off without consultation, hands sunk in pockets and chins tucked behind collars. They hadn’t been in the bar long enough for the sidewalks to thin, but they had managed to wait it out until the temperature dropped another few degrees. The light pollution that far in was enough to make the sky oil-slick black with no varying degree when Sam looked up; but then, there was a certain comfort in knowing that if you looked up, you’d find exactly what you were expecting to.

Strategically speaking, Josh’s place was closer. No, it wouldn’t be anything to bump into a cab and find themselves tossed out in front of Sam’s reedy building, but the walk of chattering energy towards Josh’s front stoop suited them better. Sam felt the adrenaline in his shins with each slap of his shoes on the concrete, beating there like the handle of a wooden spoon.

Josh’s landed in his hands, which he kept taking out of his pocket to flex, greedily grabbing at the air. It was the crash bleeding out of him, or maybe it was the foot on the pedal, it was hard to tell.

They turned the corner, Josh with a bounce in his step, and the stairs came into view, lit by the streetlights as if to not cast any shadowing doubt as to where they were supposed to be. Even more, the walk up triggered an acute wave of déjà vu over Sam. The last time he’d climbed those stairs, stood in that hallway, he’d been anticipatory in negative print, ready to be turned away. But this…whatever the opposite of that was. He searched for the word as long as it took for Josh to dig his keys out of his coat and begin sorting through the truly ludicrous amount that rattled there.

“Do you have a key to the city on that thing, too?” Sam asked, peering over his shoulder to get a better look at them. Honestly, exorbitant would be too fine of a word.

“HR didn’t bring over the gallon bag of ‘em so you could pick out the shiniest ones to make yourself look important?” One key emerged above the mangled mess, flat and savage-toothed, and slipped into the lock. “They said they did it for all the deputies.”

“Why don’t I not believe that?”

“Because you’ve never disagreed with someone that carries around two dozen keys. It’s like aposematism, some part of your brain knows it’s not worth it.”

Sam pushed Josh inside by the shoulder, shooting back something about how he disagreed with him five times before he ever made it in his office. Josh’s retort followed, something to the effect of Sam now disagreeing about disagreement, calling him contradictory as a verb, not an adjective. There were worse things to be, Sam argued, him pushing the door shut while Josh dropped his keys in the bowl he kept there.

With the door’s soft huff, their voices burned away like smoke off the fire. Leaving them standing too close in the dark of a quiet apartment, a backdrop of a motoring city just beyond the walls and tense exhales just within.

Sam could feel down to the exact degree to which this kind of moment had shifted between them. Could see it in rapture, the way Josh’s hands finally stopped gripping and he just became. Still and questioning, his own contradiction.

“You gonna stay awhile?” he asked, quiet but not soft. There was something like challenge in his eyes and they were too competitive for their own good.

Sam had been toeing the line for years; multiple lines, really, all of them in direct conflict of each other. He’d been boxed into conformity by them. Let himself be, if only because he knew what was on the other side. But just like the splash of rain on his face, just like a tug in his chest toward the right thing, just like stepping off the curb and jogging the crosswalk, he moved.

At times like these, he’d been known to observe himself from above. To watch himself play the game to win—be damn good at it, fortunately or not. But he felt, for once, the weight of being. The way his right shoulder clicked from an old dislocation and the clench of his throat as he swallowed back the rest of his pride.

He stepped over this line with purpose, grabbing either side of Josh’s face to bring their mouths together in closure of something that had started the last time they stood in that doorway. Still in their coats and their shoes and their ties, still with the grime of the day and the possibility of all to come, they slipped into this like two kids kissing on the front porch who sent up silent hope to the powers that be that the light wouldn’t flip on. Want to fever and a muffled laugh mouthed there and back.

They tripped backward, the jutting wall that separated entryway from living room cuffing Josh’s shoulder with a solid _thump._ A foot caught the end table, a shin smacked the coffee table and shot it past the other side of askew. Somewhere, a few stifled _sonofa_ , and one precise _shit_ saved for Sam getting his thumb stuck in the knot of his own damn tie. Josh laughed then—snorted, actually, but deemed it was to be stricken from the record—and swatted Sam’s free hand away so he could unfurl the whole ordeal himself. A mocking tease buckling his teeth as he gripped Sam’s undone tie in such a way that it just barely covered the pinky-keloid underneath. It dropped about the time they both realized they had better things they could be doing, hanging halfway off the coffee table, bracketed by a discarded pair of sunglasses and an out of date TV Guide with dog-eared pages.

At the back of his mind, the way back, far past the last directory, Sam knew he had five minutes to collect his tie and the coat he was in the middle of shucking and head downstairs to make an attempt at hailing a taxi before they grew too scarce.

Because, and the math continued working, by his own estimates, if the option arose, they’d wake up hip to hip tomorrow morning on the couch, looped like cursive without excuse or remorse. Josh would still be in his suit jacket and Sam would have creases in his face from sleeping against the seams, one of them hanging half off the cushions. They’d bypass remembering any changes they’d made to their lives in the previous twenty-four hours to instead scramble for the alarm clock faintly groaning from the bedroom and the beep of the coffee machine starting its first pour in the cutout kitchen. Sam would still need to try and catch a taxi, would have to dig money out of the canister he kept on the shelf by his TV to pay for the cabbie’s running meter as he scrambled into a fresh suit because arriving in the clothes he wore the day before wasn’t an option. Even if no one else noticed, he would. God forbid, but Cathy would, and then where would he be? Probably trying not to look her directly in the eye. She’d tell Ginger, or Donna, and Donna would say something to Margaret, and by the end of the day the rumor of him not owning more than one suit would make its way back to him via someone infinitely more embarrassing because his life was a high-brow drama far less than it was a study in unfortunately timed comedy.

So, five minutes. Ten at the _most_ , and that was pushing it to the furthest limit. He explained that somewhere between one breath and the next, one hand gesturing blindly even with Josh’s mouth on his jaw. Well, there was an eighty-five percent chance he’d said it out loud, but those odds weren’t half bad.

Actually, right then, he was batting a thousand in terms of odds. He was Pete Rose-ing the odds. The surrealism of the moment—his fingers on the warm skin at the base of Josh’s neck, curling up into the point of his hairline—wasn’t lost on him, not in the slightest. It was funny, how quickly they went from reflex to reflex, aggravating in its simplicity because they could’ve been doing it all along and no one had thought to tell them that, nor had they bothered to figure it out before a weeknight in the dead center of a harsh January. There was a word for that—not oblivion, but incognizance. And a little more of sheer dumb luck.

Like he could hear the train of Sam’s thought jumping the track, Josh laughed—suddenly and subdued. Sam hadn’t even realized they weren’t kissing for the way the heat of it still clung to his mouth.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, and in the time it took for him to blink, the clock on the stove switched one number for the next. Four minutes, the world seemed to mutter in blinding blue print.

“You’ve got—” He made an odd motion, fanning his fingers behind his head, which Sam watched incredulously before understanding in a lightning bolt moment— _cowlick._ He’d spent twenty-odd years trying to get the swirl in the back of his hair to lay flat, succeeded for the most part, and it chose to flare now.

In a moment of sincerity Sam didn’t know he was even capable of experiencing, Josh said, “Here,” and did what he could to slick down the fanning hair. It was to little avail, probably made it worse in the end, but the touch lodged like a complaint in Sam’s chest. For all the buildup, for all the consideration they’d given it, this part was easy. And why the hell shouldn’t it be? Why the hell shouldn’t it be easy to be happy?

Sam ran a lazy arm around his waist, the river to the rock bed, and used the lull to take stock. The peak of the adrenaline rush had long since trickled away, leaving him to contend with the weight of the day and the drink he’d finished on a mostly empty stomach and the way Josh’s hand had come to cradle the back of his head. It was all more intoxicating than it should be, Sam thought. The regret for having to leave it behind—two minutes, a clock chimed—went hand-in-hand with the relief that it wasn’t a fluke.

“I have to go,” he said, squinting against the street light that shone through a crack in the drapes. He’d definitely said that out loud, at least. Knew it in the way Josh sighed.

“Yeah, I know.”

There would come a day, Sam reasoned, when he would wake up on Josh’s couch with sleep-lines creasing his skin and a heart thrumming against his shoulder. There would come another day, he knew, when they would take breakfast standing in the kitchen with the blazing blue clock on the stove, and a day when the alarm clock in the bedroom cut through the layers of blankets, and a day when they took the same cab because they’d budgeted things all wrong, and a day that tripped into another when they didn’t see one another at all. There would be days, he tallied, when they said the right thing, or the wrong thing, or nothing, when they wouldn’t have to say anything at all because they’d been together so long, been best friends for even longer before that. There would be, as an end to a beginning, a day or dusk or night in a far-flung, cold-hearted January, when his coat could stay strewn on the couch, and his tie on the coffee table, and neither of them had to leave at all.

None of those days were there yet, but the odds were just the same as all the other sure bets. And that was what made Sam take his coat out of Josh’s hands, tie already shoved in the pocket, and pull it on. Was what made him go to the door, Josh trailing behind him, and take his leave like a pill: close-lipped and resolute.

“Okay,” Sam said at last, the looking glass dissolving for one moment in time so as to let him exist as that Sam and another Sam and each Sam that had ever stood in that doorway. A brief promise from something larger than life.

That time, Josh kissed him.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @cauldronoflove !!


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